Top Tips For Running Competitions on Gleam

So you've signed up for Gleam, had a play around but you're not entirely sure on the right way to set it up for your business.

Never fear, we've created this comprehensive guide with plenty of tips & best practice advice to get started.

Partner Up

One of the most common problems we see is when users try to run a campaign when they have no existing audience to promote it to. This means you may need to rely on advertising to drive entries (which isn't really the most efficient way of promoting a contest).

There's lots of different ways that you can partner up with others to increase your reach:

Do combined giveaways where you include products from others (then ask them to promote it to their audice also)

Ask publishers to run your contest on their site (and expose it to their audience)

Consider reaching out to a group of bloggers with individually crafted giveaways of your product.

Have multiple clubs compete against each other with individual competitions for a grand prize.

If you're a musician then you might let promoters run their own individual campaigns to sell more tickets.

If you're an agency then you can use existing partners to increase your reach for clients.

Promotion Is Everything

You can build a contest, but without a solid promotional strategy the number of entries you receive may fall short of the mark.

Luckily we've created a separate guide to help you through this part every step of the way.

You can funnel users from other parts of your site into your contest easily

Align Your Action Types With Your Prize

One of the biggest mistakes we see people make is having unrealistic expectations from their competition without really researching the type of prize potential entrants are most likely to engage with.

For example, imagine you are an online soccer store & you have 2 prizes?

Win a $250 Visa Gift Card

Win a signed David Beckham shirt + $100 to spend in-store

One of the prizes above is fairly generic, the other speaks directly to your types of customers. Try to incorporate something unique into your prize, this will greatly help you to drive more referrals & entries.

Learn How to Use Custom Actions

Gleam allows you to create your own custom actions, these can be anything you want - but they allow you to have extreme flexibility to ask users to do things that don't normally exist in Gleam.

These could be things like:

Create an account

Enter your OrderID

Answer a question

Complete a form

Visit a certain page

Mandatory Ensures Users Complete Certain Tasks - Be Careful

Be careful when making certain tasks mandatory, for example not everyone has a Twitter or Instagram account. So you may be hurting your conversion rate (depending on the types of users you are targeting).

A Single Mandatory Action Auto Expands

If you include only 1 mandatory action in your campaign we'll auto expand it for users to complete. This is perfect if you want to make Newsletter signup mandatory or place emphasis on one particular action.

Automatic Entry Gives Users An Entry For Logging Into The Widget

By default Gleam only counts a user as entered once they've completed at least one action. In some scenarios you may want to award an entry to users for simply signing into the widget. You can do this by switching on Login First > Automatic Entry during setup.

Style Your Entry Methods

On the Pro plan or above you have the option to set the colors & icons for your entry methods. You can make them unique, fit in with you branding or create an entry type that has never existed before.

Avoid Embedding Below The Fold

Quite often we see people include their competition below the fold, or at the bottom of an article. This often hurts conversion rates, as people don't specifically know there's a competition.

Here's some tips:

Try to have your competitions on a dedicated page that describes what the prize is, how to enter plus any additional information (see above).

Use our tab overlay to run your competitions across every page on your site, so it's always front of mind.

Use Bonus Entries to Keep Users Coming Back

Gleam has a unique action type that allows you to give users bonus entries each day they come back, use this to drive more visits & engagement on your site.

Filter Out Unwanted Countries

There might be times when you want to ensure that entrants to your competition are from a specific country, some platforms simply allow all countries then make you filter out the entries at the end. With Gleam you can choose which countries to allow during setup :)

Use Previous Competitions as Templates

One of the great things about Gleam is that you can always be testing various combinations to see what works best for your business, when you find one that works we make it super easy to replicate. Simply open up the previous contest & use the copy button, we'll copy across all the entry methods & you just have to add your prize :)

Offer Daily Winners

Offering a daily prize over a certain timeframe really helps drive more interaction, Gleam makes it easy to simply pick a new winner everyday, or 10 winners every day - it's up to you.

Run Ongoing Competitions

Don't think of competitions as purely an acquisition tool, many businesses also run regularly ongoing monthly competitions to retain & drive more engagement from existing customers.